And so the high-speed engine was born, but neither Mr. Clark, nor I, nor any human being then knew what it was that made it run so smoothly.
I have since realized more and more what a grand man Mr. Clark then showed himself to be. A small souled man might have regarded the matter entirely from a personal point of view, and been furious at my defiance of his authority. There are such men. I will show one to the reader by and by. Officialism is liable to produce them. I was quite unconscious of the risk in this respect that I was running. I have always felt that I could not be too thankful that at this critical point I fell into the hands of so noble a man as Daniel Kinnear Clark.
Mr. Porter’s Exhibit at the London International Exhibition, 1862
CHAPTER VII
My London Exhibit, its Success, but what was the matter? Remarkable Sale of the Engine.
Thus, as the result of a remarkable combination of circumstances, upon which I look back with feelings more of awe than of wonder, the high-speed system made its appearance in the London International Exhibition of 1862, installed in the midst of the British machinery exhibit, under conditions more advantageous than any which I could have imagined.
But the engine had a weak feature: it was wanting in an essential respect, of which I was, and remained to the end, quite unconscious, as will presently appear. Before entering on this subject I will give the reader an idea of what the exhibit was like. The accompanying [half-tone] from a photograph will, with the help of a little explanation, make this quite real.
The location was in a narrow space between a side aisle and the wall of the temporary wooden structure, 300 feet wide by nearly 1000 feet long, which formed the machinery hall. The engine was crowded closely by looms on both sides. Here were shown together the first high-speed engine, the first high-speed governor, and the first high-speed indicator. My marine governor could not be accommodated there, and had to be shown elsewhere. I was so much afraid of deflection or vibration of the shaft that I shortened up the length between the bearings and placed the driving-pulley on the overhanging end of the shaft, which for the light work to be done there answered sufficiently well. I showed also the largest and the smallest sizes of my stationary-engine governors. These were belted from the shaft to revolve so as to stand always in positions coincident with those of the governor which regulated the engine.